


Brave Is Just Another Word For No Other Choice

by miraphora



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, But that's really not important to this, Character Study, Gen, Okay well Galen Erso still dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 08:03:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10692957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraphora/pseuds/miraphora
Summary: 1000 words on just how not-brave Bodhi Rook is.





	Brave Is Just Another Word For No Other Choice

**Author's Note:**

> I've only seen the Rogue One movie and have zero knowledge of any of the supplementary/background material related to these characters. I used to read the EU pretty religiously up until the New Jedi Order stuff. Just for context. If anything is "wrong" just assume I have about as much respect for canon as I have for religion. 
> 
> I sat down this afternoon to write some Jyn/Cassian fic and Bodhi wanted to talk to me first.

Bodhi has never been brave. 

Growing up on Jedha, in the shadow of the Jedi temple, and the even deeper darkness of despair that seemed to spread outward from the Guardians who remained, he’d never had cause to be brave. He was too young when the Jedi were purged and the temple defaced to have much memory of the destruction. 

He has only vague impressions of his uncle coming to their narrow little home in the outskirts of Jedha city, where the buildings all shared at least one wall, and wash still hung from cramped upper balconies because the sonic laundries were always broken. A sliver of memory or perhaps a dream of the scent of blaster-singed skin and ozone and dust and blood--sometimes he isn’t sure if that was a memory of childhood or if his mind has supplied more recent experience to fill the gaps. His uncle and mother talking urgently, late at night, as she pressed too much of their meagre savings into his hands and cursed the Force and told him he was smart to flee--because what was left but a scorched husk, nothing sacred remaining? Who was a Guardian of the Whills, without the Jedi?

He thinks he remembers that, at least. He doesn’t know how much Bor Gullet took.

But he’s never been brave.

So when Galen Erso befriends him, the solemn planes of his broad face shaded with memory--”I have--had--a daughter. She would have been about your age.”--he thinks nothing of it. A lonely scientist, kind, who might share a word now and then if Ensign Rook took a moment to get a cup of over-steeped stim tea from the lab lounge. That’s all.

He isn’t brave on Lothal, when guerrilla forces stage an attack during a pickup of kyber stripped from the local temple. “Rebel-trained forces” says the official report from the accompanying officer, but Bodhi remembers the older woman making it to the cargo ramp with a corroded blaster in knotted hands, a scar two civil wars old stretching in a jagged blanched furrow down her prairie-tanned face, the crunch of cartilage under a standard-issue boot as he is commanded to pull away--leaving two infantry behind, back to back with carbines firing into the surging group of irregulars.

He isn’t brave during the subsequent delivery to the lab on Eadu, when Erso sits heavily in the sparse and uncomfortable chair beside him, watches his hands tremble around his tea, and says, with so much exhaustion threading his voice that Bodhi could feel it spinning out, shrouding his shoulders--”What if you could make it right?”

He isn’t brave. He is scared. And tired.

When Galen Erso presses the datastick into his hands and sends him to Jedha, Bodhi hears his sister’s voice in his head the whole way, remembers the way she twisted his ear after he got in trouble for the speeder, how she hissed at him to be smart, to stop screwing up, to keep his head down. Remembers the look on her face when he left for the flight academy, torn between pride and regret and exasperation. One last whispered: “Keep your head down. Don’t be brave. Don’t be stupid.”

It’s not bravery that sends him to Saw Gerrera. Bodhi doesn’t think there’s anything brave about doing the only thing you *can* do.

Bodhi thinks Jyn Erso is the bravest person he’s ever met after her father. She could be halfway to Wild Space with her freedom and a stolen blaster, but instead she takes the message he has brought from Eadu and she keeps it close to her heart and she draws even the surly and unimpressionable Captain Andor into the sudden and turbulent wake of her conviction, all the way to Scarif.

Bodhi has never heard a leader give their troops morale and purpose before, only the canned and autocratic ideologies that fall from the tight lips of sneering Imperial officers with hard boots and unyielding cruelty. He is not brave when Captain Andor looks him dead in the eye, his lean face stark with tension, and tells him he’s their only way out. He is not brave, but he believes, because Jyn Erso will take every chance she can, and he is the very last of her chances. 

Bodhi is not brave when the shields close and the station locks down and Captain Andor is on his comm with instructions. He is not brave when he lies to the remaining crew of Rogue One and rallies them to secure the connection to the comm station in the hope of a rescue that will never come. He is not brave because he knows they are going to die here and the only remaining purpose to life is to secure and transmit those plans and they are counting on him.

He lies and he is not brave, as he runs through crossfire with the cable clutched tight to his heaving chest, because there is nothing brave about doing the only thing you can do.

He is not brave when his hand closes around the incongruously chill black metal of the grenade and seamlessly lobs it back out of the Rogue One’s hold and into the firefight still raging on the landing platform.

He is not brave as he chokes on the searing heat of the explosion, the ramp shutting too slow to save him the brunt.

He is not brave as he pulls himself up to the cockpit, as he sweeps the limping shuttle low along the beachhead.

He is not brave as he ignores the blistering and char along his side to hover shakily near the wildly-firing repeater as Baze stands his ground over a fallen Chirrut.

He is not brave, as his breath heaves at the sight of the horizon curling up again, like it did on Jedha, consuming the city, and his family, and the temple. 

He is not brave as he drops the shuttle hard to the surf, reddened eyes watering from the heatglow of the spreading wave of destruction, and waits while a stunned and stunningly wounded Captain Andor and Jyn Erso clamber into the hold with a hoarse shout to punch it.

He is not brave, as his vision swims, and his ears ring, and he takes them into an atmospheric jump into hyperspace, a move he has never performed, years of pilots’ exams with subpar scores evaporating in the radiation that sweeps on the crest of a boiling wave toward the listing ship.

He is not brave.

He is the pilot.

There’s nothing brave about doing the only you can do.


End file.
